Conjugated polymers (CP)s are of tremendous scientific and technological importance, due to the impact they can make in the emerging field of organic semiconductors. Due to their unique combination of semiconducting and polymer processing properties, these materials offer a potential for enormous cost savings in electronic devices. Applications include field effect transistors (FET)s, organic light emitting diodes (OLED)s and photovoltaic cells (PVC)s. The use of conjugated polymers in organic semiconducting applications requires both electron-donating and electron-accepting materials. While there are a large number of known conjugated small molecules, oligomers and polymers, the vast majority of structure-property investigations are on p-type (electron donating, hole transporting) materials. In contrast, research on n-type (electron accepting, electron transporting) organic materials has fallen behind. In many instances the synthesis of such materials is difficult, preventing structural modification required for optimization of properties such as solubility, electron affinity and electron, mobility.
Organic light-emitting diodes are an advancing technology for use in, for example, flat panel display and solid-state light applications. Polymer LEDs (PLEDs) are an example of OLED-based technologies. The performance of some polymer in PLEDs can be limited. For example, some polymers can aggregate and cause fluorescence quenching. In addition, some polymers can have incomplete Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) with hosts such as poly(N-vinylcarbazole), which can give rise to substantial host contributions to the electroluminescence spectrum.